Magazine’s article about Democrat is just plain wrong

In the end, there is not much to say beyond this fact: It is simply not true.

An article in the March-April edition of Tallahassee Magazine, and the lead story on the magazine’s website, about the Tallahassee Democrat is so factually flawed it would be laughable, were the article not published by a business competitor and written by an unhappy former Democrat employee and former freelancer, Audrey Post.

That forces me to question the lifestyle magazine’s intent in publishing such a wrong and misleading story. Doubly so because it is still on the website, uncorrected, a day after the errors were pointed out to the editor, Rosanne Dunkelberger, whom I contacted on Facebook. She is also a former Democrat employee.

The article is titled “The Shrinking Capitol Press Corps,” and it depicts how several of the state’s newspapers have pulled back from covering news about state government.

The article says that the Democrat and our parent company closed our state capital bureau – save for one broadcast reporter – to save money and that we set up an operation in our main building for the other state newspapers. That is simply false and misleading. In other words, at its very best, it is wrong.

We do not have an operation in our building for Gannett’s other three newspapers in the state. We do for the Tallahassee Democrat, although many of our reporters covering state government spend little time in our office. The news rarely happens in the newspaper building.

And instead of reducing the number of people covering state government and state government issues, as the article suggests, we have expanded. As I told Dunkelberger, just count noses.

To be clear, I don’t speak for the other Gannett newspapers in the state. We made our decisions for the Democrat in Tallahassee, and they made their own choices in their home cities. As did non-Gannett newspapers. Whatever decisions about state news coverage were not made by our parent company, which is called the Gannett Company, not the Gannett Corp., as the article states.

Our decision was to protect at all costs our Capitol and state government coverage. At a time when other newspapers across Florida were cutting staff on state government news, we expanded such coverage. That was part of our strategy, because it is what is important to our readers.

Nearly eight years ago, when the Gannett Company purchased the Democrat, three people directly covered state government for the Democrat. Now there are four full-time on our Politics & Policy team, and two others cover on an as-needed basis.

In 2005, the team consisted of three people, including the bureau chief and the higher education writer. Three people are fewer than four to six, even if you have journalists doing the math.

The magazine and its reporter knew all this. The irony is that a photograph that goes with the article online of the “shrinking” press corps gallery depicts our former publisher, Pat Dorsey, and Flemming, among the few in attendance.

Dunkelberger told me she would take my complaint seriously.

“You’ve brought up a lot of considerations and I want to consider them,” she said in a Facebook message. “But I wanted you to know I received your message and that I will take them seriously.

“I can say, however, that there was no intention to take ill-intentioned potshots at the Democrat. We do compete in several arenas, but it’s not my style to puff up my publication by knocking another down.”

I hope so, but I also felt that I owed our readers an explanation. State government coverage is a passion topic for our audiences, and we are committed to not only continuing our efforts there, but also expanding.

The article hurts the Democrat’s credibility with our readers and the magazine’s credibility as well. The whole thing makes very little sense, including the very decision for a lifestyle magazine to publish an article about this topic. Further, one would expect that extra caution is taken when writing about a competitor, including not hiring someone who might have an ax to grind to write the story.

A couple things about the article are fair and true. We did move a mile down the road from the press building. But we closed nothing and cut back on nothing. We simply decided we’d rather hire and pay reporters and editors than pay for an office a few blocks from our office.

It is also true that news organizations overall are smaller and that companies did what they had to do to survive, as I am quoted in the article as saying. Companies had to pick issues that were most important to their audiences and focus very narrowly on them. That is what I described in the article as the evolution of content. We picked state government coverage.

Just a few weeks ago, I wrote about this as a blog and how we were committed to state capital – and Capitol – news. We are. We will be in the future. To say or suggest otherwise, well, it is just not true.

You can send comments by clicking on Bob Gabordi’s blog on Tallahassee.com, e-mailing him at bgabordi@tallahassee.com, sending a private message on Tallahassee.com and Twitter @bgabordi. You can also find links to his blogs on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. His mailing address is Bob Gabordi, Executive Editor, Tallahassee Democrat, P.O. Box 990, Tallahassee, FL 32302. His telephone number is 850-599-2177.

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You can send comments by clicking on Bob Gabordi’s blog on Tallahassee.com or Move.Tallahassee.com, e-mailing him at bgabordi@tallahassee.com, sending a private message on Tallahassee.com and Twitter @bgabordi. You can also find links to his blogs on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. His mailing address is Bob Gabordi, Executive Editor, Tallahassee Democrat, P.O. Box 990, Tallahassee, FL 32302. His telephone number is 850-599-2177.